In recent days, as Donald Trump executed a dizzying pivot toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia and set about stabbing Ukraine in the back, no one in the administration flailed more pathetically than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, erstwhile anti-Russia hawk and Ukraine champion. And even as Rubio was colluding in this betrayal, his official X account posted a video of highlights, spruced up with AI slop, from his Oct. 7 speech in Athens in praise of Western civilization.
The hypocrisy was hard to miss. Rubio’s speech about the defense of the West, which lamented modern Europe’s loss of the fire, passion, and courage shown by heroes from ancient history, omitted any mention of Ukraine—surely a shining modern-day example of fighting spirit and heroic sacrifice. Nor did it say a word about Russia’s campaign of sabotage and subversion across Europe. The only threat to Europe Rubio named was “mass migration”—that is, the menace of unarmed refugees fleeing destructive foreign conflicts and migrants whose labor is essential to many European economies—not Putin, an actual invader who has been waging a brutal war in a European country for five years and routinely makes threats against other European countries.
Cringe and hypocrisy aside, Rubio’s speech is worth a closer look—particularly since it appears to be self-positioning for a presidential run in 2028. (Notably, JD Vance, his likeliest rival for the nomination, promoted the speech on social media.)
Some normie conservatives see Rubio as their great post-Trump hope. A Wall Street Journal editorial hailed his Athens speech as “the speech of the year,” a “bracing and timely antidote” to the West’s moral crisis and to “narrow partisanship and sniping” in America—and concluded with an unmistakable nod to Rubio’s presumed political prospects: “Mr. Rubio is describing a larger ambition that connects the best of the West’s past to a better future. Our view is that Americans are aching for this kind of vision and leadership, and they will respond to someone who offers it.”
Sorry, normies—that’s wishful thinking.
Rubio’s speech was not without some good points. If nothing else, as the Journal notes, he ostensibly treated Europe as an ally and partner rather than a target for scolding like Vance. He said some nice words about the West’s tradition of liberty and representative government. And, amid MAGA world’s aggressive contempt for anything that smacks of intellectualism, there is something refreshing about a speech that name-checks Aristotle, Plutarch, Copernicus, Newton, and Michelangelo.
Unfortunately, Rubio’s tribute to the Greek, Western, and American spirit is also a conceptual salad in which Socrates, the 300 Spartans who resisted a mighty Persian army unto death at Thermopylae, and the mythical Achilles who chose glory over long life are mashed up into the model hero willing to die for “a cause worthy of his loyalty.” (For Achilles, who spends much of the Iliad sulking in his tent because of a dispute over his war-trophy concubine, the cause seems to be mainly his god-sized ego. Oh, and in his cameo in the Odyssey he’s a ghost who says he’d rather be a live farmhand than a dead hero. Read the Western classics, Marco.)
The even bigger problem is that Rubio’s narrative of the West, and of America, is heavily skewed toward what is, in essence, Trumpism dressed up in pseudo-high culture. Yes, there’s some lip service to liberty, but there’s a lot more glorification of “unapologetic pursuit of national power”—and imperial conquest. This is even more blatant in the video, whose biggest heroes (other than Donald Trump, prominently featured in the modern-times montage at the end) are conquerors. “The qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortés,” Rubio intones in the clip as images of the legendary men appear on the screen. “And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew.”
It did? That would be news to earlier generations of American statesmen for whom Julius Caesar, in particular, symbolized tyranny crushing liberty. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson invoked Caesar as a warning about the corruption of politics by wealth; in a 1771 article, Samuel Adams cited Caesar’s rise to power as an example of a people surrendering its freedom by falling for the “flattery” of a clever demagogue who “pretend[s] to be the people’s greatest friend.” (It’s all uncannily prescient in 2026.) One of Abraham Lincoln’s earliest published speeches, the 1838 “Lyceum Address,” invoked Alexander and Caesar—as well as Napoleon, who must have ended up on Rubio’s cutting-room floor—as examples of men whose ambitions had the potential to destroy the institutions of a free society.
Rubio, on the other hand, insists on a continuity between Alexander’s and Caesar’s wars of conquest and America’s 19th-century westward expansion. (That’s a self-undermining view of American history given that both Alexander and Caesar perpetrated atrocities that even some contemporaries found shocking.) In the speech, America is “an open and wild land” where “the civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.” In the video, the frontier spirit is illustrated with John Gast’s American Progress, the 1872 allegorical painting in which a gigantesque golden-haired female figure strides across the continent, bringing settlement, schools, and technological progress—and driving Native Americans and buffalo herds off into the outer darkness. When that image was shared on social media by the Department of Homeland Security last year, it caused a strong backlash, and not just among leftists: critics included Bradley Birzer, a historian at MAGA-friendly Hillsdale College. Yet Rubio, or someone on his staff, decided to re-up it.
Fans of Rubio’s speech would presumably dismiss the objections as weak-kneed and “woke.” Indeed, Rubio takes swipes at the recent Western propensity to guilt-trip ourselves over our history and apologize for our greatness. He’s not entirely wrong: there are good reasons to be critical of progressive narratives that reframe American or European history as one big sordid swamp of oppressions, bigotries, and atrocities. But surely, one can mention the ugly side of European exploration of the New World, or of the American settlement of the West, without reducing all of history to its worst. It’s not a 21st-century “woke” thing: Daniel Webster, whose acknowledgment of America’s debt to ancient Greek democracy is cited in Rubio’s speech, was a scathing critic of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies.
It’s also not particularly “woke” to recognize that the awe-inspiring achievements of ancient Greece and Rome coexisted with inhumanity toward the conquered and enslaved, often extreme misogyny, and an outlook that normalized the subjugation of the weak by the strong. Obviously, none of that was unique to classical Greco-Roman civilization—and Greece was, in fact, the birthplace of humanistic values that included individuality and intellectual freedom. But in the 21st century, it feels bizarrely blinkered to praise those values and never once mention that they were almost entirely reserved for elite males. And yes, it’s a good thing that we generally acknowledge those limitations.
No less blinkered is Rubio’s discussion of thumos, the ancient Greek concept variously defined as passion, fire, or hunger for glory—which he believes the modern West has tragically lost. As Rubio tells it, the Greeks “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things.” As a result, Greek city-states existed in a “perpetual struggle” of rivalries and conflicts which generated unprecedented creative and civilization-building energy.
Francis Fukuyama also wrote extensively about thumos (or thymos) in his celebrated 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. And he thinks that Rubio’s speech seriously misunderstands the concept—and completely misses the fact that it’s “a double-edged sword.” (For what it’s worth, Fukuyama also argues that there is nothing distinctly Western about thumos.) Thumos may lead to the pursuit of excellence, but it also expresses itself in a struggle for dominance that “leads to a society of masters and slaves.” The greatness of the West is that it eventually progressed from such hierarchies toward “a society based on mutual and equal recognition of all human beings.”
That progress, which Fukuyama and others have argued was founded on the Christian idea of human equality before God, is virtually absent from Rubio’s narrative—unless you count a couple of passing references to “Christendom” and to “the English genius for liberty.” The real point of his survey of history is to trace the lineage of Western culture—Greece, Rome, Christian Europe, America—and make it the patrimony of people of Western heritage:
Now, we take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.
Can people whose personal lineage originates outside the West—Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, African, Indigenous American—share in this civilization? Rubio doesn’t explicitly say no. But neither does he push back against such ethnic essentialism, which he surely knows is extremely popular on the right today. (It’s no accident that a large portion of the white nationalist far right is besotted with this fantasy version of classical antiquity.) He could have pointed out, for instance, that the continuity of Greece’s legacy extends to the American civil rights movement: Martin Luther King Jr., who was steeped in ancient Greek culture, invoked Socrates as an early practitioner of civil disobedience. But Rubio says nothing of the sort.
The Athens speech had one more moment of striking hypocrisy. While discussing the U.S.-European alliance, Rubio laughably praised the “unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland,” which made all the parties “safer, stronger, and more secure.” He made no mention of the fact that last month’s agreement followed well over a year of thuggish threats by Trump to annex Greenland by force, which created major and entirely unnecessary tensions with Denmark. If ancient Greece offers a parallel to Trump’s behavior toward Denmark, it’s the famous episode from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in which Athens is about to crush the small island state of Melos. When Melian envoys invoke justice and law, the Athenian envoys reply that such concepts have no place in a contest between the strong and the weak: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
That’s the essence of Trumpism. And, for all the flowery rhetoric about excellence, honor, and passion, Rubio’s speech offered little more than a grotesque vision of Trumpism with an erudite face.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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almost as offensive as Witkof's reference to Putin as a "humanitarian" . How we have fallen.
Marco Rubio is an ignorant, ambitious thug, with a surprising predilection for mean spirited cruelty. We have learned this about him. Let's not forget that--along with his failed "Hands" jokes.